Mining and excavating operations may require fleets of machines to transport excavated material (e.g., dirt, rocks, gravel, etc.) from an area of excavation to a secondary location. In some cases, mining and excavating operations are performed in harsh environments and/or extremely remote locations, where the use of conventional machine systems that employ human operators is prohibitively expensive or otherwise impractical. In such environments, it may be advantageous to employ machines that may be operated, at least in part, by remote control (e.g., without necessarily requiring an on-board human operator).
In some applications, there may be a time delay between an operator input command at a remote control and the initiation and/or completion of the operator command by the machine. The time delay may be a function of the distance between the location of the operator and the location of the machine. In some remote control applications, an operator that is located a large distance away from a machine may rely on a visual display of the machine on a display device associated with the remote control console to control the machine. The time delay, however, may result in the actual movements of the machine being out of sync with what the operator observes the machine doing on the visual display. In other words, the machine's location or position may have changed since the last update of the machine's position has been uploaded to the display device of the remote control console. This may lead to difficulty in the ability to accurately control the machine remotely.
One system and method for controlling a machine remotely while taking into consideration the time delay of such remote control is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 4,855,822 (the '822 patent), issued to Narendra et al. The '822 patent discloses a remote driving system for controlling a vehicle from a remote control station. The '822 patent discloses performing a bandwidth reduction to compress video information recorded at the machine in order to allow for more efficient and rapid transport of the video data to the display device at the remote control console. The '822 patent discloses that such a bandwidth reduction allows the remote operator to receive the image and video data associated with the machine in real-time or near real-time.
Although the systems and methods disclosed in the '822 patent may facilitate remote control of the machine in certain situations, it may still be problematic, particularly in situations where, despite the bandwidth reduction techniques employed by the '822 patent, there is a lag between the time that the video is recorded at the machine and when the video is displayed at the operator console. For example, if a network connection or communication link is temporarily lost, the system of the '822 patent does not employ a technique for effectively accounting for machine operation during the time period associated with the delay from the lost connection. Such unaccounted-for delay in the video data renders the remote control operator unable to effectively control the machine, as the operator receives no video information during the “black out” period.
Moreover, the bandwidth reduction/video data compression technique associated with the system described in the '822 patent is disclosed as being designed to ensure that video information is received at the operator console in “real-time” or near “real-time.” However, the system of the '822 patent does not provide a tool for estimating or predicting a future position of the machine. Should the “real-time” or near “real-time” video data become temporarily delayed or unavailable, the system is unable to provide the operator with an estimated position of the machine. As a result, the operator may not be able to effectively predict the machine's position, which may significantly impair the operator's ability to control the machine until updated “real-time” video data is provided to the remote control console.
The disclosed systems and methods for controlling machines remotely are directed toward overcoming one or more of the problems set forth above and/or the problems in the prior art.